Building Blogabond - Jason Kester1Almost a year into development, and most of the way around the world, it finally occurs to me that the process of constructing this site deserves its own travel blog. Hope you enjoy...-57.9041666543.88249835300000000

I first got the idea to build this thing back in the summer of 2005, sitting in the coffee shop at Powell's books in Portland, thumbing through a Lonely Planet book on travel writing. My dreams of a comfortable life as a traveling author were abruptly dashed, but I came across a term that the author had used that stuck with me. Blog-a-bond.

I downed the rest of my coffee and headed to the nearest Starbucks to register the domain. (Yes, it may sound silly to most of you that I would drink coffee in one coffee shop and use another one only for its wireless internet access. But if you're from Portland, you'll understand. Coffee is important.) Anyway, I had the domain even before I knew what I would build. I figured I'd probably throw up a set of tools that the average Joe could use to build something like I had going at http://www.jasonkester.com/ . Still, I was in no hurry to go ahead with anything. I just liked the name.

So now it's two days later and I'm scanning for consulting gigs on Craigslist in LA. I've been sort of living in Pasadena for a while, trying to get Expat Software ( http://www.expatsoftware.com/ ) to the point where I can skip the country again with a full load of work.

There's an overly enthusiastic ad from a guy wanting to build a MySpace clone, so I send off an overly enthusiastic response asking for more info. It turns out he wants to build a travel site, with maps and itineraries and community spaces and a huge database of everything in the world that a traveler might want to know. It was actually a pretty cool concept, but it had one fatal flaw. It would have taken an army of data-entry monkeys a year to compile enough information on cool places and sights to make it a worthwhile place for a traveler to hang out and do research.

The one thing that I brought away from the 2 weeks of proposal writing to this increasingly flaky prospect was a heads up on the existence of the Google Maps API. Holy Crap! That's Cool! I'm gonna build this guy a couple prototypes!

I ended up writing the seed that would eventually sprout into the Trip Builder. Naturally, the money never showed up and the flaky VC evaporated, but now I was inspired enough to keep going. I figured if the guy ever came back, I'd offer to cut him in on the action (though I'm still convinced there never will be any profit from this thing), and until then I'd just take this on as a hobby, building the site that I wish I'd found back when I was building http://www.jasonkester.com/ .

Things have been moving fast these last few days. We finally pushed our first build live on Saturday, and have been getting lots of good usability feedback.

Lesson One: Nobody Reads Instructions!This was our first real mistake. Our screens were easy enough to use, but you really needed to read the little block of text up top to know what you were supposed to do. Even the fact that the "Countries In View" list next to the map could be scrolled off the screen caused a few users to wonder why they couldn't pick Thailand off the list when they were zoomed in on Central America.

Lucky for us, the changes we needed to make were pretty minor. The big explanatory paragraphs are all either gone, or moved down out of the way, in favor of big simple taglines. Gone are the references to Travel Journals, Trip Reports and Diaries. Now it's all Travel Blogs and Blog entries.

Lesson Two: If it looks clickable, it better work!We have big ideas here. There are plenty of new features on the way, so we mock up all our screens to incorporate those features. The only problem is that users see a link saying "0 photos", and expect to be able to click on it to get to the page where they can view those zero photos. It never would have occurred to me to do that!

So this was another easy fix. We went through and lopped off anything that's not fully built. And in a few cases, we just cranked overnight and made those features work. So now, if you click on something, you can be assured you'll go somewhere.

We're using a latitude/longitude database put together by the US government. It has over 2 million populated places in it, and for the most part it's fairly accurate. But not always. During testing, I kept seeing cities showing up in places they really didn't belong. And strange things, like Fiji showing up as 'in view' no matter where in the world we were looking.

Digging around in the data, I managed to find a dozen or so mistakes, usually where a longitude of -97.115 would end up as 97.115 or 9.7115. Luckily, most were tiny villages that could simply be plucked off the map and never missed. We also had to deal with countries like Russia, which are far enough North that they actually span most of the globe.

Anyway, most of it is fixed now. Though just yesterday I got an email wondering why 'Centering' on New Zealand would show you a blowup of the Indian Ocean. Slowly, slowly, it's all starting to come together.

Cranking out features like this and like that! Forums went live today, and they've exploded with a whopping ONE post to date. Yeah! Taking the world by storm!

Photos are also getting easier to manage by the day. With luck, we'll have Tagging in place for photos and comments soon. For now though I'm having to deal with silly things like making the site "search engine friendly", and other minor technical details that keep me away from actually making the site better.

There's also a new design on the way. Sad news I know for those of you in love with grey boxes and oversized fonts. But we live in a visual world, my friends. And looking at the competition it is clear that we simply cannot hang unless we clean the look up a bit.

Dubai is not in the database. As in, the capital city of the UAE, probably a city we need. I've noticed a few other standouts that just aren't there in other places too. This is not good.

We're really going to need a way for users to add their own locations to the map. And while we're at it, we should probably add the concept of aliases for places we know about. The town of Abu Zaby shows up right in the center of Dubai if you zoom in on the map. It would be nice if our application knew they were the same place.

But wait, it gets worse! Cairo and Alexandria are missing too. The tiny oasis of Al Qasr is there, but the two largest cities in the country are just plain gone. Not acceptable. We're going to have to find a better dataset.

Oh yeah, I can zoom into my hotel in Cairo and see the name of the neighborhood. But the city is not there. And it claims that Italy, Russia and the Seychelles are in view!

Ah ha! Turns out in my initial import, I neglected to include capital cities!

You'll find this claim on just about every travel site out there, but if you dig around you'll also probably find a mailing address in Oakland or some other non-exotic location. There's an office there, staffed with anywhere between a half dozen and a few hundred people, most of whom have never been outside the United States. This is not unexpected, since any place that actually hired dirtbag travelers as its staff would have such high turnover that it would never get anything done.

With Blogabond.com, I'm hoping to make that "by travelers" claim a reality. As I write this, I'm sitting at a guesthouse off Khoa San road in Bangkok, nursing a Beer Chang and working out the details on how not to get my laptop stolen when I head out to Cambodia tomorrow. I'll be on the road for the better part of a year this time around, and with luck I'll find enough time to work this site into presentable shape by the time I'm done.

I just pushed a new build live that addresses a few minor bug fixes and finally adds the ability to comment on other people's trip reports. In the next few weeks, you can expect to see enhancements to make the Maps a bit more usable, and a new, more elegant design. So if you're a big fan off grey boxes and photos of cows, best speak up now because they will soon be a thing of the past!

I spent the winter of 2005/2006 on Tonsai Beach in southern Thailand. I seem to spend about every other winter in Thailand, climbing rocks on the beach. It's just that good. This time around I had some client work to keep me busy part time, and with the laptop along it was easy enough to spend the odd afternoon geeking out on Blogabond.

The site had been live for about 3 months at this point, and was finally starting to attract a few actual users. I'd been intentionally keeping a low profile, and letting people find the place on their own. As Joel ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ ) says, "when you get premature publicity, lots of people check out your thing, and it's not done yet, so now most of the people that tried your thing think it's lame, and now you have two problems: your thing is lame and everybody knows it."

So, with a few Real People using the thing, I was able to get some feedback about why Real People think that Blogabond sucks. I've since fixed a lot of those things, and will hopefully get around to fixing more of them soon. For now though, there's this climbing route on the beach called Tyrolean Air that's been taking up a bunch of my time. It will be my first 7c, and I keep taking 20 foot falls from the endurance section above the crux. Sometimes, work has to take a back seat…

Believe it or not, if you spend enough time sipping Mai Tais on a tropical beach, you will eventually get bored of it. After 4 months in Thailand, I was ready for a change. How about a last minute, 60 day return ticket to Australia? I hear they've got surf there.

So, with the promise of another couple weeks client work (for real money), I booked a crazy plush holiday flat in Noosa Heads for myself and the lovely miss Helen. Bought some surfboards, wrote some code, surfed a bunch, lived large. Bought a cheap van off an English chick, threw a bit more money at it so that it might actually run, and headed South in search of right point breaks and wireless hotspots named Linksys and Default.

A few new features kept creeping into the site. Somewhere along the way, Tags were born, browsing and search were improved, and the map stopped zooming out to see the entire planet just because you started your trip halfway around the world from where you were actually writing reports. Internet access is actually hard to come across in Australia, so updates would pile up for a while before being thrown live with crossed fingers.

Once we made it to Sydney, the surfboards got stashed in the back and the climbing gear came back out. Spent a week in the Blue Mountains and another at Nowra, clipping bolts with friends met in Thailand. Finally, we limped the van down to Melbourne and passed it off to a friend, who managed to get it halfway back across town before it died a painful death in the middle of rush hour traffic.

According to the rulebook, every travel blog needs at least one Travel Horror Story, so here's a quick rundown of our return flight to England.

Well, first off, we didn't actually have tickets to England. Just a return flight from Melbourne to Bangkok via Singapore. So that's 11 hours plus 7 hours for those of you keeping score. Once in BKK, we cleared customs with all our gear and a surfboard, and proceeded to try to book the rest of our trip home. According to every travel agent we'd talked to in Australia, "There is no such thing as standby anymore." "You need to have a confirmed reservation from a travel agent to board a flight." That's not actually the case, but good on ya, travel agents, for trying to sell us a full-fare last minute ticket!

We ended up with a sketchy, over-padded, wait-listed itinerary onward to Birmingham, with nothing more than a handwritten credit card receipt in Thai Baht to keep us from being booted onto the street in Amsterdam. I guess the nice thing about post 9/11 travel is that if you somehow manage to get a standby ticket, you'll be the only one on the waiting list. The desk in Amsterdam had no idea what to do with us, so they just stuck on a plane and had us stand around until a couple seats freed up.

So, add in another two flights at 14 hours and 2 hours, followed by another customs line with a surfboard and a 4 hour drive to Wales. That leaves us awake for a little over two days altogether, which may not be a record or anything, but it's not bad considering that this blog is supposed to be about writing software.

I've been thinking a lot about photos recently because, frankly, it's not that easy to upload and manipulate photos on Blogabond right now. It's certainly doable, and not much of a chore if you just want to upload and tag a half dozen shots for a Blog entry. But, as users have been mentioning with increasing frequency lately, it's really time consuming to dump all 500 shots from your memory card onto the site.

That, in my mind, is a good thing.

While it's true that we offer unlimited photo storage for free, we do so with the Hope that our users will limit themselves to only posting the best photos that they have, and the ones that best compliment the journal entries that they write. The theory is that since it takes a bit of time to get a photo up and viewable, our users will be a bit more selective with the pictures they choose to share. At least, more so than they might be if we made it easy to dump the 4GB memory card from a digital camera straight onto the site.

At the end of the day, there are plenty of good sites on the web that offer free photo storage. And realistically, anybody using Blogabond.com simply as a place to store and view their photos would probably better served moving over to Flickr. I think of Blogabond as something like a cocktail party. Just a bunch of friends sitting around, telling their travel stories and showing off some cool photos. The last thing you really want at a party like that is somebody setting up the slide projector and running through all 4000 photos of his trip to Peru. It's all about selectivity, and I think that making it just a little bit difficult to set up that projector might turn out to be a good thing.

This is what I've discovered over the last month, trying in vain to find a place to plug in my laptop around Kendal, a pretty big town up in the Lakes. Unlike any remote corner of Vietnam, where you'll find three internet cafes in a little village with no tourism, mighty first world England has virtually no place to plug in. You can find a smoky pub with wi-fi, but try to connect to it and you'll hit the hopelessly broken signup mechanism that shells you out to an ISP to purchase time online, then blocks the page where you'd give your credit card details. Not that I'm all that excited to spend £60 for a month of access in the first place, but the process of doing so should not be this painful.

But now, things are looking up. I'm in Chamonix now, kicking it at a giant ski chalet, gearing up for a couple months of client work. With luck, maybe I'll have a few hours here and there to play around on Blogabond. But for the most part, I'll be heads down alongside the rest of the Expat Software team, building The Next Big Thing for our client.

I'm liking the idea of offshore development with a strong team imported from back home. We've done collaborative things remotely in the past, with good results, but this is the first time we've tried to bring the entire team onsite. Even the client is coming out for the duration of the project, so we'll eliminate the communication gap that often slows down remote development. It's also cool that we're halfway around the world from the distractions that usually get in the way of productivity. With the whole team snowed into the chalet, there's nothing to do but crank out code. It should be good.

I'm going to be a Millionaire. Check it out, the numbers speak for themselves. Up above, you'll see the results of our first week's advertising revenue (highlighted in yellow), along with an extrapolation showing our growth through the end of the month (assuming the current trend continues.)

So, if you happen to know any venture capitalists looking to get in on the Next Big Thing, you should send them this way. We're heading for glory!

So, as you may or may not have noticed, we've got a new look for the site. It's a bit more rounded and less cluttered, but still as cow-filled as ever. Mostly, I've gotten rid of a bunch of things that are just taking up space, and moved them off to separate pages where they are still just as useful. They're just not in your face all the time anymore.

This redesign has been a long time coming, as the old look was not pretty by any standard. I actually paid real money to three separate designers to come up with logo ideas and concepts for a new site look-and-feel. What I got back were a dozen flashy designs with lots of blue chrome and pictures of happy couples walking on white sand beaches. Had I been trying to sell electronics or package vacations in The Bahamas, we'd be on to something here. But for a site targeted at dirtbag backpackers writing reports from an internet cafe in Kampala, they didn't really fly.

In the end, my buddy Ben drew a rounded box on his Mac and put the word Blogabond above it. Looks good enough to me. Let's ship it! Besides, the Web 2.0 crowd will love it. Rounded corners, Tags, Clouds, even a Google Maps Mashup in there. Top it off by putting the word "beta" in the logo, and next thing you know I'll be speaking at some conference about the future of the internet.

"As though I wanted will meet personally the author of clauses articles on your site, and personally to it him will get acquainted. But unfortunately I live in other country and I have no an opportunity to go on the world. Success to you the dear expensive friend. "

It looks like the SpamBots have finally found the comment links on Blog entries.

This one was especially fun, as it started out by simply commenting on a dozen different blogs, praising the author's "clauses" and offering ESL advice on how to better the world.

Then it started including helpful links to Porn.

I've put up a simple spam filter that should stop this sort of thing from clogging up the comments in the future. There's an off-chance that some of you may have trouble posting comments if you don't have Javascript enabled on your browser. Keep me posted if you notice anything strange.

Anyway, I've gone ahead and left a few of the more harmless comments to a few people's blogs. So if you're lucky, you might get an inspirational message like this in your comments:

"How many I was in a network the Internet, but your site my loved liked,favourite! Thanks."

Consider it a gift from the (hopefully) short-lived Astroturfing SpamBot!

First off, I want to quickly thank all you lot for helping Blogabond take off so quickly. Our user base doubled over the holidays, and then Doubled AGAIN in February! Somebody must have been spreading the word. You guys rock!

I've been quietly putting new features live for the last few months, and leaving them out there for you all to discover. So you may have noticed that your blog entries are autosaving themselves behind the scenes, that you can hide your draft entries until you're ready for the world to see them, and that you can add new places to the world map.

But this week, I finally got around to putting up a few major features that have been in the hopper for a long time. Blogabond was always intended to be a place for Independent Travelers to hang out and share stories, but until recently it's been sorta tough to get a conversation going with anybody on the site. Sure, you could leave comments on one of their posts, but unless they happened to check it they might never see it. And if they replied to you, how would you know?

So now, everybody gets a little Mail link next to their name. You can send private messages to anybody on the site. If you've got an account, you can check out your Inbox under the My Stuff tab, and if you've given us your Email address we'll even forward along any direct communication that you receive. So if you read my entry about Monkey Bay, Malawi and want to know if it's worth going, you can shoot me off a private message and ask me about it.

We've also got Buddies now. You've seen this idea before, so I don't need to go into detail, but yeah, you can now start collecting friends on the site and keeping tabs on what they're up to. Less digging around trying to find stuff. Thus, more better.

There's another feature teetering at the brink of being pushed live that will let you compliment users on their cool blog entries and photos. Once we get a bunch of votes for stuff, I'll probably scrap the idea of "Featured Whatever" and just let you guys decide what belongs on the Home page by voting on it. So if you want to displace The Hulk from his seat of glory, you can organize all your friends to come onto the site and vote on all your stuff. (Or I guess you could also just let the system work itself out so that things floated to the top on their own merit. But that might not be as much fun.)

Anyway, thanks again for helping to make Blogabond a reality. Keep up the suggestions!

This weekend, I've been blowing off a bunch of paying work so that I can put some new features into Blogabond. This is stuff that's been bugging me for a while and I think it will make the site just that little bit more usable.

First, it always bugged me that when you clicked on "Photos", you didn't get to see any Photos. Just a bunch of links. That was lame. So yeah, we need to put some pictures up there, but which ones? I dunno. Guess we can't do that until we do...

Voting. Yeah, check out the bottom of this post. See the little "This Rocks!" link? Click on that, and you'll give this post a little karma bonus. If enough people click it, maybe it will boost my profile up onto the homepage. Democracy in action!

So yeah, every post and every photo on the site now has one of those little vote buttons. You can vote photos onto the "Cool Photos" list, and vote people onto the "Featured Traveler" list.

And finally, I've messed with the discussion forums a bit so that people can actually figure out what they do. Try it out. Click the "Talk" link up top and ask your fellow Blogabonders a question. I bet you'll get a few replies.

Anyway, let me know if you like any of this new stuff. And hey, I'm off to Europe in a few days. If you're touring around France, Switzerland or Italy, let me know!